Those who are physically disabled and reliant upon a combination of a wheelchair and an automobile or other small passenger vehicle to travel around frequently experience difficulty in transferring their wheelchair to and from the automobile.
Even with a collapsible/foldable wheelchair and a vehicle in which there is adequate capacity to accommodate the wheelchair, the loading and unloading of the wheelchair can be difficult, time consuming and damaging to the upholstery of the vehicle and reduces the internal space of the vehicle. Furthermore, such loading and unloading generally requires assistance of the disabled person by one or more able bodied persons.
To overcome these problems a wide range of carrying devices have been proposed for mounting externally of an automobile to transport a wheelchair folded or otherwise. Examples of such proposals include U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,934,894, 3,937,376, 4,738,581, 4,411,580, 4,697,975, EP-A-0 025 803, U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,400,129, 4,397,607, and GB-A-2,210,856. These systems make use of carrying devices mounted to the rear of the vehicle. Without exception, all suffer the significant drawback that the stored wheelchair is effectively unprotected. In all these cases, the folded wheelchair mounted on the carrier at the rear of the vehicle is liable to be spattered by spray from the road surface and is unprotected in the event of rear end shunt accidents.
Furthermore, enclosing of the wheelchair in an external storage container mounted to the rear of the automobile potentially creates an obstruction to the opening of a rear upwardly lifting door of the automobile rendering the rear interior of the car relatively inaccessible.
It is a general object of the present invention to provide an external wheelchair storage container for automobiles which overcomes these problems.